Who Owns Better?

Vishal Garg founded Better in 2015 in New York City, initially as a digital mortgage lender aiming to strip commissions, paperwork, and delays out of home lending. The pitch was a fully online mortgage experience: preapproval in minutes, no commissioned loan officers, and a transparent fee structure, against an industry still run on paper and branch networks.

Better grew explosively during the 2020 and 2021 mortgage refinance boom. Revenue climbed from $88 million in 2019 to $837 million in 2020 and $1.18 billion in 2021, as record-low rates drove origination volume. SoftBank's Vision Fund invested $500 million in 2021 at a reported valuation of roughly $6 billion, and the company announced a SPAC merger with Aurora Acquisition Corp. that would value it at $7.7 billion.

The reversal was severe. Rising interest rates gutted the refinance market, revenue collapsed to $361 million in 2022 and $72 million in 2023, and the company cut staff repeatedly. Garg's December 2021 Zoom call firing roughly 900 employees became a viral symbol of corporate missteps and triggered an executive exodus and internal investigations. The SPAC transaction, delayed for two years, finally closed in August 2023 at a valuation far below the original announcement.

The rebuilt company repositioned around B2B and AI. Its Tinman platform, which licenses Better's origination technology to other lenders and distributes mortgage capacity to partners including Credit Karma, grew to represent more than 40 percent of funded volume by late 2025. For full year 2025, the company reported $4.7 billion in funded loan volume and $164.9 million in revenue, up 32 and 52 percent respectively, and targeted adjusted EBITDA breakeven by the third quarter of 2026.